The clinical and commercial success of antibodies, antibody fragments and other therapeutic proteins has led to the need for very large-scale production in mammalian cell culture. This has resulted in rapid expansion of global manufacturing capacity, an increase in size of reactors (up to 20,000 L) and a greatly increased effort to improve process efficiency with concomitant manufacturing cost reduction.
For example, most antibody therapies require high doses over a long period of time, which requires large amounts of purified product per patient. Therefore, manufacturing capacity to meet the demands of antibody production is a real challenge; it is desirable to have highly productive manufacturing processes.
One means by which to improve in vivo production levels of an antibody or other protein is to generate novel polynucleotide expression constructs which cause enhanced levels of protein production as compared to that of standard constructs. The present invention addresses this need in the art.